Top 50 Albums of 2003

The Top 50 Albums of 2003 as selected by the Pitchfork Staff

Underwater parasites, extinct fantasy creatures, desert-island deaths, and a purely unfathomable "bone Camaro": morbidly absurd or absurdly morbid? Is there even a difference? Does it matter? Not to The Unicorns; the mortal fixations of their "more easily referred to by acronym" debut, WWCOHWWG?, are frequently as hilarious as jokes about various cancers and being torn apart by hungry cougars can be, but most cunningly serve to conceal one of the most intelligent pop albums of 2003. It's stealth-pop; underneath the black humor, gurgling analog synthesizers, occasionally too-cute vocal tradeoffs, and crashing cymbals and guitars lies a sleeping melodic juggernaut. Count the bread-and-butter chorus refrains on one hand and you'll have fingers left over, but that just leaves the band free to pluck any passing hook out of the sky, hone it to, uh, infection, and discard it before symptoms develop. And you, you poor sap, won't even realize it until you walk away from the inspired chaos seemingly unaffected only to find one (or more) of the innumerable catchy bits lodged permanently within your psyche. --Eric Carr

09: Broken Social Scene You Forgot It in People [Arts & Crafts/Paper Bag]

Prologues! Reprises! Earned indulgences! How many bands wish they could deliver the year's best bassline ("Stars and Sons"), or tried to record the best co-ed bash-up ("Almost Crimes")? How many attempted to rescue the sax from Eddie Money and his 80s cabalists? The only group more populous than Lambchop, in the year that Canada kicked ass, concocted a cafeteria-style Ziggy Stardust for the AD/HD "generation." No couple on this planet should apologize to each other without the nu-grass "Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl" spinning in the background. "Lover's Spit" thrives as indie rock's answer to Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day". Listen closely for VU-style interband coachings before the crescendo of "Shampoo Suicide" leaves you caressing daddy's guns. Finally: the great disc that The Sea & Cake forgot to team up with Sonic Youth to make, an anglophonic masterpiece of libidinal politics. Pitchfork's editor made fun of their bandname, but in literary, sociological, and psychoanalytic ("social penetration") theory, breaking a social scene is a form of ideological critique, a means of dismissing an Eisenhower-hymen. This album asks: What if Altamont went right, on a subway, in Belgium? What if, when we peed, we aimed for God? You Forgot It in People travails such porn-turf as watersports, snowballing, and barely-legalism, resulting in unadulteratedly subversive and sophisticated pop art. --William Bowers

08: M83 Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts [Gooom/Labels]

A good twelve years after Loveless, a gorgeous wall of melodic guitar noise just doesn't seem so impressive anymore. While countless bands have shallowly imitated My Bloody Valentine's signature aesthetic, French electronic duo M83 broke it down to its fundamental core, reconstructed it with drum machines and dance synthesizers, and turned it into one of the most beautiful albums of the year. Rather than obsessing over textural nuance, M83 placed their focus squarely on songwriting, building sprawling organic masterpieces from decidedly inorganic sounds. Though Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts is remarkably dense, nothing seems gratuitous or out of place-- melodies collide and tangle, synthesized snare drums bounce off monoliths of hissing analog noise, and hushed vocals float atop crushing electronic symphonies. At times almost unbearably intense, Dead Cities is an unrelentingly engrossing listen from start to finish-- an album that demands your undivided attention, and never ceases to justify that demand. --Matt LeMay

07: The Shins Chutes Too Narrow [Sub Pop]

After the Shins' debut album, Oh! Inverted World, put the Albuquerque-based foursome on the tip of every indie music fan's tongue two years ago, fans wondered if the group would could possibly strike such gold again. Suffice to say, Chutes Too Narrow shattered expectations, a meticulously sequenced, stripped-down collection of indie pop gems encompassing endless Technicolor universes where frontman James Mercer's lyrical abstractions rub shoulders with shimmering heroic guitar lines, and layer upon layer of catchy melodic bliss. Clocking in at just under thirty minutes, and with exuberant, sparkling production from the Pacific Northwest's favorite producer Phil Ek, Chutes Too Narrow seems-- even months after its release-- incapable of wearing out its welcome, particularly as its piece-de-resistance, "Saint Simon", builds upon a swirling brew of guitar chord changes where decadent verses are as memorable as the chorus, and irresistible bridge sections drop from the heavens like Kinks-encrusted pop manna. It's a moment so intoxicating, you might forget that Chutes Too Narrow has nine more of them. --Hartley Goldstein

06: Prefuse 73 One Word Extinguisher / Extinguished: Outtakes [Warp]

No one on this list can touch Scott Herren for boldness and endurance this year. Clocking in at over two sick hours of precisely calibrated breakbeats, Prefuse more than made good on the promise of his jittery debut, Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives . One Word Extinguisher broke ground as the first instrumental break-up record in the history of hip-hop. Consumed by rage, shame and loss, a mind had locked itself in the studio to lick its wounds and gnash its teeth, to spit out what was left of her, or at least to choke it down. Somehow, it worked: The subsequent hour-long companion LP, Extinguished, carries little trace of that bitter ordeal. It's Prefuse at his most verbal and impatient, hurtling through dozens of twisted fragments with barely enough time to drop, flip, and scrap each one for the next. The effect is crowded, dizzy, and best taken lying down. The two records sound similar and feature their fair share of non-sequitur transitions, but each has its own personality: One Word Extinguisher is slower and more consistent, favoring gauzy textures and extended polymetric feels; Extinguished is harsher and more outlandish, riddled with vinyl twists, vocal scraps and battle raps. The left turn Herren's just taken with the new Savath + Savalas album make it clear that he'll not be held hostage to success. While mainstream rap producers continue to cultivate their stutters and lilts, for the time being Prefuse has a near-monopoly on the hard, dark edge of hip-hop. --Jascha Hoffman

05: Manitoba Up in Flames [Domino]

Manitoba's follow-up to 2001's glitched-out debut, Start Breaking My Heart, was one of 2003's biggest surprises: Somewhere between his first Boards-inspired instrumentals and his signing to Domino Records, the instrumentation and production of the Aquarian age had inspired Dan Snaith to leave his pastoral IDM roots in the dust. In a year that saw most of the major names in the vast world of IDM making at least some concessions to traditional pop form, Snaith went all the way. Trading his Reaktor sound tools for a guitar and a rusty glockenspiel, he decided to see us on the other side.

Well, almost . Despite the bands that are frequently namechecked in comparison, Up in Flames isn't an album of songs-- at least, not in the conventional sense. What I hear in this record is a guy in love with the sound of 60s psychedelia much more than with the melodies, harmonies or outrageous personalities. Despite the booming drums, guitars, swirling organs, and Shangri-la backing vocals, this music is about tension and release, builds and breaks, not verses and middle eights. The lyrics are an afterthought, while the titles are long and specific in the Kid606 tradition, offering the emotional guidepost sterile IDM so often needs. Here, of course, it wasn't necessary: This record has feeling to spare. Snaith used the kandy-kolored tangerine-flake signifiers, and the borrowed or handed-down memories that go along with them, and, with the digital auteur's sense of control, created music to express life-affirming bliss. --Mark Richardson

04: Radiohead Hail to the Thief [Capitol]

Hot damn, them epochal Brits done trucked over to Hollywood and dropped another compelling puzzle-piece on the stunted grad student in us all! This episode's secret word is "aphasia," as our fave quintet plods exquisitely through a batch of literate and almost standoffish anti-pop anti-anthems about the failure of utterance, as if channeling Reagan's delirium. The booklet's phrase-map artwork, the album's four titles, and the songs' double-namedness initiate a thematic bombardment that quickens throughout the 1984 -referencing "2 + 2 = 5", the tongue-tied "Myxomatosis", and the hallucinatory "Scatterbrain". Thom Yorke alludes to the Bible, Homer, fairy tales, and The Stepford Wives, but this disc's closest hardbound kin is Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, the protagonist of which mumbles at reel-to-reel recordings of himself in his fallout hut. See Hail 's pro-bunker stance, its spliced dialogue songs, its schizophrenic chants (THE RAINDROPS THE RAINDROPS and little babies' eyes eyes eyes), its line about erasing all tapes, and its final line before the album ends with seven seconds of silence: "Turn this tape off."

Beckett's Krapp was alone, but Hail 's wailer has children to be paranoid about. Caught up in the old trick of how some things are worth worry, while worry remains worthless, Yorke sounds as deflated as a teat ransacked by its oblivious litter. When the band's not consigned to lurch through nullabies that evoke offloaded Les Paul DNA, they meticulously rollick like fingerpainting automatons, or, during the squall of "There There", as if submitting a soundtrack for Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' in... 'Shaft' . The breakdown from The Beatles' "I Want You" is wrung neurotic to supply the backing for "A Wolf at the Door"'s taxman-citing panic-rant about calling the cops (consult Go Home Productions' mash-up of "Karma Police" and "A Day in the Life"). "We Suck Young Blood" is seasoned with off-time zombie handclaps: a Down With People hymn for the dawn of brand-name pill organizers. The production is Howard Hughes hermetic; just as early Springsteen seems the perfect warmth for vinyl, Radiohead match the coldness of CDs and the even more abstract MP3. Still, a new sentimentality and reliance on cliche have emerged: Kid A is growing up, and Yorke has begun to care about the lil' motherscratcher. Thus his band is becoming our ham-fistedly intricate Pink Floyd. --William Bowers

03: Sufjan Stevens Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lake State [Asthmatic Kitty/Soundsfamilyre]

The paper says that now that we've lost our manufacturing jobs, we're down to selling the mills: a few entrepreneurs are taking them apart and mailing the pieces to China. The grimmest thing about watching our fellow Americans lose their jobs and communities is how utterly powerless we feel about it-- voting for one clown or against another or buying a Michael Moore book won't even make a ripple in the economic sea. That Sufjan Stevens can capture that melancholy, alongside a dozen other themes in this record about his birthstate, explains why this sleeper release has earned so much praise. His ingenuity lets him blow past the usual self-imposed rules of singer-songwriting: Stevens places his sympathetic Elliott Smith/Art Garfunkel vocal on acoustic ballads, but also orchestrates pulsing post-rock arrangements-- repetition as industry as hope as a fleeting illusion-- that break up the melancholy. Tracks like "Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head!" pound their way to a state of delight.

Of course, it's no slight to the music to say that Michigan 's true greatness rests in its lyrics. Stevens doesn't just bare his feelings here, he digs through them to find why they matter; he shows an unusual sensitivity, and never resigns himself to an answer (a la "That's Just the Way It Is"). Let's face it, at a time like this-- when most artists steer away from reality and focus on making you feel good, horny or angst-ridden-- anyone who tackles the question of America, who challenges himself this much, deserves credit and imitators; by doing it so successfully, Sufjan Stevens has made a record that's damn near crucial. --Chris Dahlen

02: The Books The Lemon of Pink [Tomlab]

Like their 2002 debut, Thought for Food, The Books' The Lemon of Pink is the cerebral world of thought, feeling, and idea made sound. Arbitrary, disconnected soundbytes rattle around beneath swells of fiddle, banjo, and other antique strings like half-remembered moments of clarity. The otherworldly samples and vocal snippets could easily be relegated to the status of novelty, or worse, distraction, in less perfectly arranged music, but here the spoken interludes and melodies work in beautiful concert: otherwise distant, sepia-toned nostalgia is lent emotional resonance by eggshell-fragile plucking and triumphant crescendos, and with the album's very first utterance, "The lemon. Of pink," amid its first hesitant tunings, hits like a blast from the Reading Rainbow past, making it plain that this album is less reality than fairytale.

And as the cover itself implies, beyond the casual innocence of so much of the material and presentation, the strict construction of a storybook is at work here, too; moreso than its predecessor, The Lemon of Pink feels like a journey, and more importantly (like any good story), a journey with a beginning, middle and end. As an album, and as individual songs, it never lacks purpose. The unfocused wanderlust of the Thought for Food 's more disjointed, experimental tendencies has been slightly shifted towards a more refined sense of melody; in every aspect, from the what is surely the best production heard on any album this year to the most intricate subtleties of the compositions themselves, The Lemon of Pink strides confidently forward, not content to simply be musique-concrete background noise, but to create a remarkable listening experience, and it succeeds. Without question, it succeeds. --Eric Carr

01: The Rapture Echoes [Strummer/Universal]

Some albums are worth the wait. When "House of Jealous Lovers" first began circulating to UK clubs on white-label 12-inches in 2002, the buzz grew so quickly that within two months, everyone I knew had downloaded it and become addicted. It didn't take long for us to forget that only two years prior, The Rapture had gained some degree of notoriety as a terrible live band who'd lucked into a contract with Sub Pop before quietly and mysteriously parting ways with the label. This bore no similiarity to the band's previous outings. This was something completely fresh, something we hadn't heard done in quite this way, or at least not quite so flawlessly.

As the Brooklyn-based production team DFA rose to prominence, issuing new singles every few months, word came that Echoes was finished and ready for release. It would be out, they said, just as soon as the label could secure solid distribution. And then, just as soon as the producers could sway the band to add their names to the songwriting credits. And then, just as soon as the band could decide which major label's offer to take. As bullshit mounted, people began to fear the record was missing its window of relevance-- by the time it saw official release in October of this year, the dancepunk frenzy "House of Jealous Lovers" had ignited more than a year previous seemed already on life support, as hundreds of art-pose rich kids rode its coattails with their own hastily produced bids for the crown.

Fortunately, Echoes had long-since arrived by then. Like Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot before it, the record had leaked to file-trading services in June and blown up dancefloors all summer long. Which was as it ought to have been: Of the hundreds of dancepunk albums to flood the underground, none even began to approach this album's crystalline vision. Treble-charged guitars attacked like guard dogs and back alley killers, lunging out with knives drawn and stabbing furiously. Keyboards reflected dirty neon like rainy streets and the Hudson River's toxic glow. Live drums locked with preprogrammed electronic ones in sweaty, hedonistic neo-disco trances that instantly filled floors like Paradise Garage in its prime-- although unlike so many of Larry Levan's Stephanie Mills and Crown Heights Affair cuts, movement wasn't imperitive; this record was as devestating in the club as in your cubicle.

In retrospect, there's no question now that this sound was the gold standard most aspired to by young bands this year, and for a number of very good reasons: It was the most innovative, it was the most inspiring, and with the evening news stuck on an infinite loop of war casualties, economic misery, pedophilia and corporate downsizing, it was the most fun. When this era enjoys its renaissance in fifteen years, we will remember this album: nothing says 2003 more. --Ryan Schreiber